A Warming Climate Is All Over Alaska’s Senate Race. The Candidates Hardly Mention It.

If you listen to the candidates running for the U.S. Senate seat in Alaska, some of the biggest issues in the race revolve around the state’s fisheries, its oil and gas development and soaring prices for fuel and other staples.

Left largely unsaid, however, is that climate change is playing a role in at least two of these issues. Warming waters are affecting the state’s fish, including declining salmon runs. Concerns for climate change are a chief cause of opposition to expanded oil and gas development in the Alaskan Arctic, where rapid warming is melting permafrost, damaging infrastructure and altering animal migrations that many Alaska Natives rely on for subsistence.

Yet the candidates have hardly mentioned climate change. And that might be one of the few ways the race is similar to others around the country.

But first, what’s different. Take fish.

Mary Peltola, the Democrat who represented Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2022 until January 2025, has adopted a slogan of “Fish, family, freedom.”

“Potentially that was strange to have fish as one of your top three words for folks in D.C.,” said Chantal de Alcuaz, co-executive director of The Alaska Center, an environmental advocacy group, “but it’s not strange at all for Alaskans.”

Despite stretching across an area nearly one-fifth the size of the contiguous 48 states, Alaska has fewer than 740,000 people. And many of those people consider fishing, and fish, central to their lives. For Alaska Natives, salmon are not only food—cultures revolve around the harvest and processing of the fish. Across the state, many non-Indigenous Alaskans fill their freezers each year with fish they catch, too. In recent years that’s all been getting harder. 

Runs of some salmon species have declined sharply. State and federal authorities have issued repeated closures of subsistence and sport fishing along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, which cut across the state.

During a debate last month, Peltola and her main opponent, Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, agreed that climate change is one of numerous factors affecting Alaska’s fisheries, including salmon runs. Scientists say the causes of the decline in some salmon species are complex and multifaceted, but include warming waters.

Yet the candidates have focused their attention on trawling, a commercial fishing practice that targets other species but is allowed to kill a certain number of salmon and other fish as bycatch. Peltola has proposed banning “factory trawling,” which she characterizes as large, out-of-state boats distinct from smaller, local operations.

At the debate, Peltola said climate change was “not as easy to get our arms around” as trawling. “This is the one place where Congress, Alaskans, has an opportunity to say no,” Peltola said of the fishing practice. “This is a man-made impact.”

Peltola has stressed her history of fishing on the Kuskokwim River with family. Sullivan has worked hard to establish his own credentials on the topic, and has introduced legislation to limit bycatch from trawling. 

Alaska’s Senate race is unusual when it comes to oil and gas, too. Unlike the national parties, there is little daylight between the candidates when it comes to drilling.

Alaska relies on oil and gas revenue to fund the state budget, and residents receive an annual dividend from a sovereign wealth fund that was built with petroleum royalties. Many Alaska Native communities in the Arctic North Slope have also generated substantial income from fossil fuels. But production is on a decades-long decline.

The Trump administration has pushed through a series of changes to allow drilling on new lands, including areas some Alaska Natives consider critical to their subsistence hunting of caribou. Recent proposals would strip environmental reviews and opportunities for public comment on drilling in the Western Arctic. Sullivan has said he pressed the administration to take these steps. He also sponsored a bill signed into law last year that repealed protections in the Western Arctic enacted by the Biden administration.

Peltola has stressed that she, too, supports oil and gas. At a September forum of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, she claimed credit for pressing the Biden administration to approve the Willow project, a large Arctic oil development, and criticized Sullivan for voting in 2021 to confirm Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who had been critical of oil and gas drilling before taking office.

A Peltola spokesperson declined to answer questions about whether she supports the Trump administration’s moves on oil and gas development, instead issuing a statement saying, “Mary will aggressively advocate for every solution on the table to bring costs down—including increased oil and gas production, as well as restoring tax credits for solar, wind, and hydropower projects that were cut by Dan Sullivan. Alaskans expect their Senator to do both, and as an independent voice for Alaska, Mary will stand up to anyone to deliver.”

Sullivan says he supports an “all of the above” energy policy but voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which repealed renewable energy credits. His office did not respond to requests for comment.

Yet while the candidates’ attention to fish and their similarities on oil and gas might be unusual, their reluctance to discuss climate change is not. Across the country, many Democrats have decided it is safer to discuss energy prices.

“I think some of it is just advertising savvy,” said Amy Lauren Lovecraft, a professor of political science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Peltola knows she has support from people who care about the issue, she said, “because Sullivan doesn’t care about climate change. His record is pretty clear.”

Enei Begaye, executive director of Native Movement, an Indigenous advocacy group in Alaska, said many Alaskans care about warming, “led by Alaska Native people who are feeling the impacts, the deadly impacts of climate change right now.”

Despite Peltola’s support for oil and gas, Begaye said there is a clear difference between the candidates running for Senate and for the state’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We have two federal seats that have been doing all they can to undermine public process, and so we really have the opportunity in this election to get folks in there who will respect public process, respect the laws,” Begaye said.

While Alaskans more often send Republicans to Washington, D.C., the state has an independent streak. Nearly two-thirds of voters are not affiliated with either party. In Alaska’s ranked-choice primary, which pits all candidates against each other regardless of party, Peltola drew the most votes, edging Sullivan by eight percentage points. With low turnout in the primary, however, that represented a difference of fewer than 14,000 votes. Peltola holds a small lead in most polls.

As the election nears, each candidate is trying to convince voters they stand for Alaskans—not Washington—and the issues they find important. A recent advertisement released by Sullivan’s campaign features a hunting guide from Kodiak Island saying he’d seen the senator kill a bear with one shot. The ad says Sullivan defends oil and gas and protects hunting, fishing and Second Amendment rights. 

What it does not say is that Kodiak Island, isolated from the grid like many Alaska communities, gets nearly all of its electricity from renewable sources.